I blog, therefore I am.

Books

06/05/2020

{At this point, I’m hardly even pretending that I will actually read these books, but they’re in my Internet Archive queue for a reason, I assume, so I might as well mention them.}

For those who prefer their history “from below,” the People’s History of Christianity has several volumes that merit your attention. The volume in which I am interested right now is the People’s History of Medieval Christianity, edited by Daniel Bornstein, which covers the period from 600 CE to 1500 CE. Rather than reiterating the inspiring (but mostly apocryphal) stories of saints or the power plays of bishops and popes, this book, and its companion volumes, wants to shed light on “the voiceless, the ordinary faithful who wrote no theological treatises, whose statues adorn no basilicas, who negotiated no concordats, whose very names are mostly lost to historical memory,” and on “their religious consciousness; their devotional practice; their understanding of the faith; their values, beliefs, feelings, habits and attitudes; their deepest fears, hopes, loves and hatreds; and so forth.” The usual histories tell us how prominent Church leaders wanted Christianity to be understood and practiced; this kind of history tells us how it was understood and practiced by ordinary Christians.

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Charles Derber is an almost-too-perfect example of a left-wing academic, a Social Justice Warrior whose entire career has been spent critiquing the American Dream, capitalism, democracy, baseball, mom and apple pie (I assume). Best known for his 1996 book, The Wilding of America, Derber has made a living over the years biting the hand that feeds him, from the safe redoubt of his ivory tower. I am currently undertaking to read his Marx’s Ghost: Midnight Conversations on Changing the World, which includes sections with such intriguing titles as “Super-Capitalist Crises and the Regime of Death” and “The Ghost Doesn’t Promise a Rose Garden”. Setting aside the obvious jocularity about a book that is patently ghost-written, and keeping in mind that it was written in 2011 and is therefore pre-Trump, Marx’s Ghost nonetheless looks like a relevant read, especially with its call to “Stir up blessed unrest”. [For those who care about such things, and for whatever it suggests about Derber’s point of view, the book is dedicated to Noam Chomsky.] Why Derber chose the conceit of a midnight conversation with Marx's ghost at Marx's grave is beyond me; his re-evaluation of Marx and his effort to find relevant insights for today in Marx's work could have just as easily been done in a straightforward manner. No one should fault an author, though, for amusing himself, so long as it's not at the reader's expense.

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Lastly, Patrick Brantlinger’s Bread and Circuses is “an examination of reactions to mass culture that interpret it as either a symptom or cause of social decay.” Brantlinger begins with the observation that “Very little has been written about mass culture, the masses, or the mass media that has not been colored by apocalyptic assumptions”; explicitly or implicitly, the claim is typically that newspapers/TV/pop music/pop art/the Internet are dumbing us down, shortening our attention spans, trivializing our lives, and making a mockery of our cultural inheritance—Shakespeare, Mozart, El Greco, and myriad other Dead White Men, all of whom died, apparently, for our right to (in Neil Postman’s phrase) amuse ourselves to death. Brantlinger objects to this facile dismissal of mass culture, and he’s got the classical education to sustain that objection. The book’s subtitle, Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay, and the fact that it cites, early on, the fabled Thorstein Veblen, suggest it may be intended for academics; but a glance at the index reveals that Brantlinger uses Christopher Lasch as a source (but not, surprisingly, Neil Postman), as well as Kafka, Kierkegaard, Freud, Nietzsche, Camus, E.F. Schumacher, and, wonder of wonders, Nikolai Berdyaev—so it may be more accessible than one suspects.

04/09/2020

The old game of “What books would you take with you if you were to be stranded alone on a desert island?” is no longer an idle entertainment; it’s a game we all get to play for real for the Duration of the Current Crisis. Though the libraries are closed, books are readily available these days in digital form; we should all be getting a lot more reading done now than we were pre-Crisis. On the other hand, Netflix and Amazon are tempting distractions…

Most, though not all, of my reading of late has been about Russia. That said, here are some of the books occupying my time.

Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: I was never a fan of Norman Mailer—that is, of the Mailer public persona, the brash, swaggering, belligerent, obnoxious, ambitious, narcissistic, self-promoting, self-styled literary genius. But the books he produced in the latter part of the Sixties and throughout the Seventies–The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, and The Executioner's Song—were astonishing pieces of reporting and writing; Mailer’s egomania notwithstanding, he chronicled that era as well as anyone.

The Executioner’s Song was published in 1979; it is, of course, the story of Gary Gilmore, a murderer executed, after lengthy delays, by the State of Utah. The case drew national attention because Gilmore, having been convicted and sentenced to death, wanted to be executed; even before his trial, he had said to his cellmate, “I’m going to make them do it. Then we’ll see if they have as many guts as I do.”

Mailer’s book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980—for fiction, unaccountably; perhaps the Pulitzer committee should have invented a new category, "non-fiction novel". In any case, according to the publisher’s blurb, The Executioner’s Song “taps the source of American loneliness and violence,” but I disagree; I don’t believe it taps the source of anything, though I do believe it portrays the aimlessness and randomness and brokenness of so many American lives. If you don’t recognize the sort of characters you meet in The Executioner’s Song—Gilmore, of course, his girlfriend Nicole, her many husbands and boyfriends, the fractured families, and all the others who drift in and out of the narrative—then count yourself lucky; you’ve lived a fortunate life.

For something completely different: I just happened on a free copy of David Harvey’s 2014 book, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. David Harvey is a highly respected Professor of Anthropology; that is to say, he is not by trade an economist, which enables him to say some intelligent and incisive things about capitalism. He is also, the cover blurb informs me, “among the twenty most-cited authors in the social sciences and humanities and the world’s most-cited academic geographer.” (Could Professor Harvey eventually grace us with a book on “The Geography of Capital”? I don’t see why not.)

Unlike Daniel Bell, who focused, decades ago, on capitalism’s “cultural contradictions,” Harvey looks at the “internal contradictions” of capitalism’s economic dynamic, contradictions which, he believes, “contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe”. Capitalism has always been about limitless growth, but the world, alas, has limits, some of them quite stubborn. Harvey identifies, among other systemic flaws, capitalism’s “stress on endless compound growth, [its] necessity to exploit nature to its limits, and [its] tendency toward universal alienation.” Seventeen Contradictions should make excellent reading while we’re all stuck at home waiting for the Second Great Depression to begin. 1

Finally, because I don’t want to ignore my Russian obsession, I’m reading Victoria Frede’s Doubt, Atheism, and the 19th-Century Russian Intelligentsia, a book whose title alone contains three of my favorite topics! As the following passage suggests, those topics inevitably entail others—e.g. politics, authority, social and economic class conflicts, etc:

In Russia, atheism was less a statement about the status of God than it was a commentary on the status of educated people in an authoritarian state that sought ever more forcefully to regulate the opinions and beliefs of its subjects. The state's promotion of Russian Orthodox piety and insistence on intellectual conformity made adherence to the faith of the church appear hypocritical, an abdication of the individual's duty to pursue knowledge and truth. Young people needed new answers to the questions of how to live and what to live for.

Professor Mikhail Epstein, in a lengthy essay on “Russian Spirituality,” observes that 19th-century Russia, despite a variety of political and social reforms, did not become “secular” in the Western sense; rather, it became “religiously secular,” meaning that secular ideologies of revolution and rebellion were adopted dogmatically, secular party platforms were espoused with religious zealotry, secular books by people like Marx and Engels were revered as if they were scriptures, and secular leaders (like Lenin) were followed devotedly and eventually made into saints. Victoria Frede, citing statements by Nikolai Berdyaev, concurs that Russia’s revolutionary upheavals were not simply “a misguided attempt to construct a utopia on the basis of Western ideas but the product of the innate millenarianism of the Russian mind, a quest to create a heaven on earth—an atheist heaven. Members of the intelligentsia had become missionaries of this cause well before they discovered Marx.”

So—what is anyone else reading?

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1 I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Republicans, for all their professed dislike of Keynesian economics, have not hesitated in the Current Crisis to empower the federal government to step in, to open up its coffers, and to shovel money out the Treasury door as if it were rolls of paper towels for the president to toss at his adoring crowds. Whereas Barack Obama, in 2009, could get almost no Republican support for his $800 billion stimulus bill, Congress is now spending literally trillions to keep the economy—businesses and individuals alike—afloat. Democrats, for their part, are apparently (and appropriately) willing to help save the economy even if doing so might help Trump politically; when the shoe was on the other foot, Republicans preferred to stay on the sidelines, hoping, as Rush Limbaugh famously said, that Obama would fail to get the economy going again.

After Bush’s war in Iraq, after Hurricane Katrina, after the 2008 financial crash, after Hurricane Maria, and now after a botched federal response to a pandemic and the consequent shutdown of the American economy: could someone please explain to me why anyone in this country would ever again vote for a Republican?

03/13/2020

{Yet another listing of yet more books I am pretending/threatening to read…these are all from local libraries, but thank goodness for www.archive.org should the libraries have to close down.}

I recently watched the Amazon Prime show “The Hunters”: a promising premise that, by the end of Season One, had been taken so far over the top that it would need the world’s tallest ladder to get back down. However, the show was based (however loosely) on an historical fact (in the opinion of some, an historical scandal): Project Paperclip was a government program designed, at the end of World War II, to facilitate, openly or covertly, the relocation of Nazi scientists and officials to the United States. Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door tells the charming story of How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. Before all you hemophiliac liberals wax shocked and indignant: should we have let the Russians get hold of German experts and German expertise? Lichtblau estimates that “more than sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and doctors…were eagerly recruited to the United States by the Pentagon,” and those are just the ones who entered legally, “through the front door,” under their own names. As Lichtblau notes, “Whatever moral baggage they brought with them was outweighed, military officials believed, by the promise of technological breakthroughs.” And we did get to the moon, after all, and the Russians didn’t--so, mission accomplished.

Allen Frances is a psychiatrist, which apparently qualifies him to diagnosis an entire society; he does just that in his 2017 book The Twilight of American Sanity, being about The Age of Trump and what sort of widespread clinical disorder(s) in the body politic could have enabled it. Calling Trump’s political rise “absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul,” Frances scoffs at the popular notion that Trump is a textbook narcissist, when in fact Trump’s narcissistic traits have proven quite advantageous in his life. “[Narcissism’s] defining features fit [Trump] like a glove,” Frances admits; “but being a world-class narcissist doesn’t make Trump mentally ill. Crucial to the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is the requirement that the behaviors cause [the individual] significant stress or impairment.” Whereas, to the contrary, “Trump shows no signs himself of experiencing great distress,” though he is undoubtedly “a man who causes great distress in others.” Making a moral rather than a psychiatric judgment, Dr. Frances concludes: “Trump is a threat to the United States, and to the world, not because he is clinically mad but because he is very bad.” Frances summarizes here the larger premise of his book: “What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind’s future? Blaming Trump for all of our troubles misses the deeper, underlying societal sickness that made possible his unlikely ascent…if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn’t crazy, but our society is.”

Was Revolution Inevitable? is a collection of essays about Turning Points of the Russian Revolution. The volume is edited by Tony Brenton (Sir Tony Brenton, that is, former British Ambassador to Russia); contributors include the likes of Orlando Figes, Martin Sixsmith, and Richard Pipes, among others, along with Sir Tony himself. Even a quick study of Russian history suggests that the Romanov dynasty’s days were clearly numbered and that tsarism and traditional autocracy were fated soon to end, one way or another; the 1917 revolution, however, and the October coup that followed, were undoubtedly contingent upon a whole series of unpredictable events, fateful decisions, unintended consequences, and—despite the Marxist belief in History as an impersonal force—the rivalries, conflicts, and ego-driven turf battles among the leading personae involved.

Finally: I’m always a sucker for an intellectually respectable right-wing take on politics and/or history, so I was eager to get hold of Christopher Caldwell’s acclaimed The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Having procured my copy and having begun reading eagerly, I managed about thirty pages before setting the book down in disgust (and washing my hands; always wash your hands). If I could suggest a different title for Caldwell's effort, it should be called “Tendentious Drivel” (which may or may not be the name of a band). His operative thesis is that the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties, well-intentioned as it was, overshot its mark; it threw out the precious baby of the American constitution along with the filthy bathwater of segregation, thanks to which tragedy “Alright then we are two nations now” (not that Caldwell uses that line from John dos Passos). In Caldwell’s own phrasing: “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible…much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail…” For those who take this argument seriously, allow me to note that conservatives over the years have also insisted that first Abraham Lincoln and then Franklin Roosevelt put into effect their own illegitimate versions of the hallowed Constitution; which is to say, Caldwell is singing a familiar tune ("Gimme that Old Constitution")—but then, that’s what conservatives do, isn’t it?

02/26/2020

Blame it on Nikolai Berdyaev, if you like, but Russian history (and understanding the Russian “national character”) is my new raison d’etre, or at least my raison d’reading material.

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The Last Man in Russia, by Oliver Bullough, is based on the premise that “Russia is dying from within”: decreasing lifespans, a negative birthrate, and epidemic alcoholism being the primary evidence Bullough cites, all of which he attributes to Soviet Communism’s having crushed the spirit of the Russian people and robbed them of any hope for a better future. Bullough’s Cassandra-like forecasts lead a reader to think that the Russian national motto should be “Let’s Get Drunk and Die”. Bullough structures his indictment around the life of Father Dimitry Dudko, an Orthodox Christian priest who was imprisoned in the Stalinist Gulag before emerging, post-Stalin, to gather around him “a circle of sacred trust at the heart of one of history’s most deceitful systems.” Despite the inspiring heroism of Father Dudko and his followers, I don’t think this book will have a happy ending.

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Even those of us who don’t know that much about Russian history are vaguely aware that Vladimir “Lenin” was originally Vladimir Ulyanov, and that he had an older brother (older by four years) who was hanged in 1887 for taking part in a plot to assassinate the tsar (Alexander III). Philip Pomper’s Lenin’s Brother tells the story of Alexander Ulanov and his fellow conspirators; in so doing, he helps explain The Origins of the October Revolution, when (in 1917) younger brother Vladimir finally got his revenge against the Russian monarchy. If anyone is looking for a case study to illustrate the Law of Unintended Consequences, they might well choose the arrest and execution of Alexander Ulyanov.

Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom follows his earlier On Tyranny. Mr. Snyder is obviously worried about the current state of the world; in The Road to Unfreedom, he explains how right-wing populism has come into vogue in the West, aided by Vladimir Putin’s disinformation campaigns. Snyder warns that the next step on our path is Fascism. Some readers, myself included, may be distracted and/or confused by Snyder’s tutorial on the difference between “the politics of inevitability” and “the politics of eternity,” but the book’s overall message is clear: liberal democracy and the rule of law are under attack in Europe and America, and their survival is by no means guaranteed. {Of particular interest to me is Snyder’s explanation of how Putin has cynically claimed to be the defender of “traditional Russian values” (especially regarding sex), exploiting cultural issues (especially homophobia) to distract from his country’s economic and social woes (see above, The Last Man in Russia). In doing so, Putin has won praise from American conservatives, including Rod Dreher, who really ought to know better.}

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Lastly: The Cabin at the End of the World is the most recent (2018) effort from novelist Paul Tremblay. Having made a splash in the genre of offbeat neo-noir (with two books about narcoleptic detective Mark Genevitch), Tremblay has since ventured into Stephen King territory. Stewart O’Nan describes The Cabin as “a gloriously claustrophobic and gory tale of faith and paranoia,” while Stephen King himself calls it “thought-provoking and terrifying, with tension that winds up like a chain.” All I’ll reveal is that the titular cabin is inhabited by a seven-year-old girl named Wen and her two dads, Eric and Andrew, whose idyllic vacation getaway in New Hampshire is invaded by four strangers on a mission from God (they say) to save the world from apocalypse. It’s a distressing conundrum: are the invaders insane (it sure seems like it) or are they inspired (I wouldn't bet on it)? In any case, my point is that I’m reading this book because it’s not about Russia.

02/01/2020

{In the beginning was the book: not really, of course, but it seems to summarize my life pretty well.}

The Modern Predicament is a 2011 collection of essays and reviews from George Scialabba, who has been described as “a shrewd, learned, undogmatic guide to contemporary debates about theology and postmodernity.” The brief essays in this volume touch on the likes of Nietzsche, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch (one of Scialabba’s favorites), T.S. Eliot, Charles Taylor, Jackson Lears, and others (Gertrude Himmelfarb!) who might be included under the vague heading of “anti-modernist”.

At some point, I assume, we will realize that every age has its characteristic discontents, and that our various dissatisfactions with modernity require neither a wholesale retreat from modern life nor a return to medievalism. Scialabba, who respects but rejects the pre-modern worldview, and who suspects but accepts our secular social imaginary, is an intelligent and sympathetic commentator on all of this.

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Making a long story short: my studies of St. Paul led me to the idea of theosis (deification), which led me in turn to Eastern Orthodox theology, which gave me an excuse to revisit the work of Russia’s Nikolai Berdyaev and his friend and colleague Lev Shestov, through whom I discovered the likes of Sergei Bulgakov and Vladimir Solovyov, all of which set me to wondering how to account for the extraordinary creative, spiritual, social and political ferment of Russia in the hundred years or so leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. What history and what “social imaginary” could have produced Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Berdyaev, yet culminate in the rise of Lenin and Stalin?

The history of Russia is a vast and daunting topic, but one must begin somewhere; Lesley Chamberlain’s Motherland is “a useful synthesis of 200 years of thought by nearly 40 Russian philosophers.” Among other factors, Ms. Chamberlain touches on “Russia's inferiority complex stemming from Nicholas I's closing of all philosophy departments in universities in 1826” and on how “Russian thinkers defined themselves against a Western perspective—Hegelian knowledge, Cartesian individualism, Adam Smith's political economy—that, in their view, simply could not comprehend the culture and society of Russia.”

In the opinion of the reviewer at Publishers’ Weekly, Chamberlain demonstrates that “The progression toward totalitarianism is subtle but clear in hindsight, a result of Russia's precarious position on the physical and moral outskirts of the Western world: Russian disdain for the West, its sense of being morally superior, always contained the shadow of a fear that Russia was the inferior place.”

Oddly, one of Ms. Chamberlain’s central claims is that “in their attempt to answer [fundamental] questions, [Russian] thinkers neglected the role of the individual, prioritizing instead the need to end injustice and autocracy.” Anyone who is the least bit familiar with the likes of Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Shestov will want Ms. Chamberlain to please check her notes; she seems to have missed some things.

That said, I’m looking forward to learning how the Russian philosophical tradition, “with its deep affinities to theology and poetry,” somehow led to the gulag. My limited knowledge of 19th-century Russia suggests that the nation found itself locked in a struggle against the powers and principalities of both history and modernity; for all the genius, heroism, and genuine spirituality and humanity demonstrated by the Russian people, the nation’s better angels did not prevail.

History, it seems, is tragedy; but we already knew that, didn’t we?

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Paul Tremblay, I have recently learned, is an acclaimed writer of horror, fantasy, and science-fiction novels. His first book was The Little Sleep, published in 2009; it’s a crypto-noir featuring a narcoleptic private investigator caught up in a case about which he knows nothing on behalf of a client he may have imagined. Tremblay’s protagonist cracks wise, as expected, but seems to have no real aptitude for sleuthing, no taste for fisticuffs or gunplay, and little if any sex appeal: shamus as nebbish. The title is a nod to Raymond Chandler as well as a reference to the hero’s neurological affliction, and the book bears a glowing blurb from Jonathan Lethem. Since man does not live by theology alone, I’m hoping Tremblay will offer a diversion from my studies.

01/03/2020

{While waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering if anyone is going to invoke “Wag the Dog” to explain President Trump’s decision to start a war. 1}

Andre Comte-Sponville’s The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality is a sequel of sorts to his earlier A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues. His atheism is neither irreligious nor anti-religion, and his humanism finds much in common with all the world’s greatest religious traditions:

It is possible to do without religion but not without communion, fidelity or love…what we share is more important than what separates us. Peace and mercy to all, believers and unbelievers alike. Life is more precious than religion, communion is more precious than churches, love is more precious than hope or despair. There is no need to wait until we are saved to be human.

Comte-Sponville’s approach to spirituality might be summed up in the phrase “What’s God got to do with it?” Both the book and the author are humane in the deepest and best senses of the word, and The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality is, thankfully, as far from “New Atheist” polemics (Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris) as it can be.

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Serving perhaps as a companion volume to Comte-Sponville, Robert C. Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic begins with the author’s confession:

“I have never understood spirituality. Or rather, I never paid much attention to it. When the subject was introduced, I made a convenient excuse to leave, perhaps expressing myself inwardly with a muted groan, expecting what followed to be platitudinous if not nonsense. Even when I was an aspiring young philosopher with poetic inclinations, I found most of what passed as spirituality something of a sham, fueled by pretension and dominated by hypocrisy.”

At some point, Mr. Solomon saw a light, if not the light:

“Between my disgust for self-righteous hypocrisy and my disdain for mindless New Age platitudes, I mistakenly rejected what I now see as an essential dimension of life. Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life.”

Solomon proceeds in that vein, in search of “a nonreligious, noninstitutional, nontheological, nonscriptural, nonexclusive sense of spirituality, one which is not self-righteous, which is not based on Belief, which is not dogmatic, which is not antiscience, which is not other-worldly, which is not uncritical or cultist or kinky.” Whether he succeeds, and whether he gets beyond his own platitudes and “thoughtless banalities,” is up to the reader to decide.

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Finally: Dream and Reality is the autobiography of Nicholas Berdyaev, one of Russia’s leading 20th-century philosophers/theologians. Known primarily for his emphasis on human freedom and creativity, as well as for his optimistic anthropology (i.e. the notion of evolving “God-manhood” and of man’s status as “co-creator” alongside God), Berdyaev in reflection sounded like nothing so much as a modern Gnostic:

I cannot remember my first cry on encountering the world, but I know for certain that from the very beginning I was aware of having fallen into an alien realm. I felt this as much on the first day of my conscious life as I do at the present time. I have always been a pilgrim…the consciousness of being rooted in the earth was alien to me.My sense of uprootedness and disestablishment in the world is the heart of my whole world outlook…I was an absentee even when I was actively present in life…the feeling of distance, the knowledge of having come from some other world, to which I would return, never left me.

“Some of my friends,” Berdyaev wrote, “used to call me in jest ‘the enemy of the human kind’.” Some friends; some jest.

Ancient Gnostics, it should be recalled, were labeled “enemies of the human race”—as were both Christians and Jews (the latter by, among others, Saint Paul himself). Yet Berdyaev was quick to say, “I have an intense love for man,” adding “Salvation is inconceivable except in the company of the whole of mankind.” Gnostic or not, Berdyaev was evidently of the type who found mankind more tolerable in theory than in fact.

Berdyaev’s intellectual and spiritual journey took place in the midst of the turmoil that was Russia in the first half of the 20th century—until, that is, he was sent into exile by the Bolshevik leadership in 1922, along with hundreds of other Russian intellectuals, artists, and academics. That Soviet Russia deliberately deprived itself of such men and women goes a long way towards explaining what went wrong with the Communist experiment.

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1 From Wikipedia:

Some critics of the Clinton administration, including Republican members of Congress, expressed concern over the timing of Operation Desert Fox. The four-day bombing campaign occurred at the same time the U.S. House of Representatives was conducting the impeachment hearing of President Clinton. Clinton was impeached by the House on 19 December, the last day of the bombing campaign. A few months earlier, similar criticism was levelled during Operation Infinite Reach, wherein missile strikes were ordered against suspected terrorist bases in Sudan and Afghanistan, on 20 August. The missile strikes began three days after Clinton was called to testify before a grand jury during the Lewinsky scandal and his subsequent nationally televised address later that evening in which Clinton admitted having an inappropriate relationship.

The Operation Infinite Reach attacks became known as "Monica's War" among TV news people, due to the timing. ABC-TV announced to all stations that there would be a special report following Lewinsky's testimony before Congress, then the special report was pre-empted by the report of the missile attacks. The combination of the timing of that attack and Operation Desert Fox led to accusations of a Wag the Dog situation.

12/20/2019

{Note: The following books are all available online, for free, at Internet Archive (www.archive.org). If you're not familiar with the site, please check it out; you'll be amazed at what you can find.}

Amir Aczel’s THE JESUIT AND THE SKULL tells the story of the 1929 discovery of “Peking Man,” a critical find in the archaeological search for human ancestors, and of the involvement in that discovery of controversial Jesuit theologian/paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Full disclosure: I began reading this book thinking that it was about de Chardin’s involvement in the infamous “Piltdown Man” hoax; as it turns out, Aczel mentions that incident only in passing. The larger reason for my interest in de Chardin is that his cosmology, with its emphasis on the “cosmic Christ,” seems to me a logical extension of St. Paul’s eschatological teachings; unfortunately, Aczel doesn’t spend much time in this book discussing such matters.

ADAM SMITH IN HIS TIME AND OURS is an intellectual/philosophical biography by historian Jerry Z. Muller; it is also an attempt to correct one-sided and oversimplified notions of Adam Smith’s economic theories. “Those who are most likely to cite Smith’s authority often misunderstand the substance of his thought.” Muller portrays Smith—who was the author of THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS before he was the author of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS—as an advocate for “self-interest” only insofar as it was shaped and tempered by social institutions designed to promote the common good (or what our U.S. Constitution refers to as “the general welfare”). The subtitle of Muller’s book, Designing the Decent Society, summarizes what both he and Adam Smith thought to be essential: not the reign of laissez-faire but a delicate balance between individual liberty and social justice.

Michael Sandel’s JUSTICE: What’s the Right Thing to Do? addresses much the same issue, but from the standpoint of ethics rather than economics. Ought “justice” to be primarily about freedom, about equality, about social welfare, or about virtue? In this 2010 volume, Sandel examines a number of public controversies—abortion, affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, etc.—from various ethical perspectives, in an effort to “help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well.” I’m reading this because it’s the class text for a course I’ll be taking in January at the University of Montana (“The Ethics of Uncertainty”) but also because Michael Sandel is one of the best known and most highly respected public intellectuals of our time, known especially for his ability to communicate philosophical ideas to the general public.

Finally, R.H. Tawney’s RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM is widely considered “one of the true classics of twentieth-century political economy”. Tawney, in the words of one reviewer, “tracks the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages, shedding light on the question of why Christianity continues to exert a unique role in the marketplace.” In the process, he “offers an incisive analysis of the morals and mores of contemporary Western culture.”

It’s also the case that Tawney’s prose is not only lucid but entertaining; the author’s understated wit helps make the book a joy to read. For example, the following passage is Tawney’s commentary on the transition from the Church-dominated medieval world to a modernity ruled by the State:

“Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority, expelled from the altar, finds a new and securer home upon the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to the hands of the State. Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.”

Again, allow me to commend the folks who run the Internet Archive; like local librarians, they are performing an invaluable public service.

11/05/2019

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." {Mark Twain}

RIGHTING AMERICA AT THE CREATION MUSEUM examines Ken Ham’s monumental exercise in disinformation (“alternate facts,” if you will): the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati. The authors, Susan and William Trollinger, both teach at the University of Dayton; for what it’s worth, they are also both listed at www.atheists.org. Their intention is plainly stated at the outset: “The Creation Museum seeks to shape Christianity and Christians in powerful ways that will have a lasting impact on American life. All of us have a stake in understanding what is happening at the museum and its role in preparing and arming crusaders for the ongoing culture war that polarizes and poisons U.S. religion and politics.” Alas, the Trollingers’ academic perspective results in a book significantly less entertaining than its subject matter promises, bogged down with solemn observations about “the linear grand narrative of developmental progress,” “the patriarchal family with its corresponding sexual division of labor,” and about how 19th-century museums, in the face of “troubling forms of social and cultural decay at the hands of monopoly capitalism and technological change…provided encouragement especially for men about the dominant role that they needed to fulfill so that things might be right once again in America.” Reading RIGHTING AMERICA, it’s difficult not to wish it had been written by Bill Bryson, Jon Ronson, or someone else with a sense of humor and an appreciation of the absurd.

John Reeves’ THE LOST INDICTMENT OF ROBERT E. LEE presents The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon. That case, as Reeves reminds us, was both legal and moral in the wake of America’s deadly and hideously destructive Civil War; the decision not to put on trial the leading Southern general proved more consequential than any at the time could have known. It will come as a surprise to most readers—it did to me—that Lee was actually indicted for treason in June, 1865 by a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia; the presiding judge, John Underwood, declared that the Confederacy and its leaders had “hands dripping with the blood of slaughtered innocents.” THE LOST INDICTMENT tells the story of how it came to pass that Robert E. Lee was not only spared trial and conviction, but emerged as a tragic figure caught between conflicting loyalties; Lee’s transformation from traitor to hero became central to the postwar narrative of Southern nobility, gallantry, and honor.

Finally, THE LAST ADAM is A Study in Pauline Anthropology, written as a doctoral dissertation by Pauline scholar Robin Scroggs and published in 1966. According to Scroggs, Paul’s anthropology (his understanding of humanity) was conditioned by his Christology (his understanding of Christ); in his letters, Paul elaborated the contrast between the “old Adam” whose story was told in Genesis and the “new Adam,” the risen Christ who had been revealed to Paul by God. That contrast was stark, to say the least, and its implications were startling:

Just as the subjection of the cosmos was due to man’s sin, so the release will be due to man’s redemption from sin. In effect this means that the cosmos as well as man looks to the Last Adam for salvation…Paul does not use the term “new creation” as a metaphor. Man in Christ will be, indeed already is, a truly new creature...Paul is [not] speaking simply of some emotional, intellectual, or decisional experience of the natural man. Paul’s language implies further that the reality of this new nature is nothing more nor less than a restoration to that truly human reality God has always desired for man.

Paul took an exalted view of the “new Adam,” both as exemplified by Christ and as presaging the future status of the human race:

Christ by virtue of his resurrection is not changed from being a man; he is rather changed into the true man. While the two natures—earthly and exalted—differ radically in their existence, both are nonetheless human natures. The very fact that Christ is “first-born of many brethren” is an indication of his continuing humanity.

Paul contrasts the earthly nature of the first man [Adam] with the non-corporeal nature of the eschatological man, a nature which is probably to be seen as like that of angels...Christ’s resurrected body is of a heavenly “substance” [and] as a result of the life-giving pneuma, the believer will also possess a spiritual body. [For Paul] Adam and Christ are the founders of two races of men, the mankind of death and the mankind of life…Christ is the reality of true humanity [and] the revelation of divinity...Paul has taken up the radical emphasis of Judaism upon the theomorphism of man.

“Theomorphism” refers to the notion that humanity, created “in the image of God,” is destined for a God-like end; as Paul said, “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” THE LAST ADAM possesses the salutary virtue of taking Paul seriously and of not attempting to rationalize away his mysticism, however puzzling and even outlandish it may seem to modern readers.

09/30/2019

Now and then, I try to take a break from reading about Paul the Apostle in order to focus on (among other things) the likely collapse of the American republic. Here are the non-Pauline books to which I am currently attending.

Over the years I’ve taken a passing interest in the perennial controversy concerning the identity of William Shakespeare and the authorship of his works; as we speak, I have the film “Anonymous” ready to watch in my Amazon queue. In SHAKESPEARE: The World as a Stage, Bill Bryson touches on that controversy (a traditionalist, he votes for the good old Bard of Avon) while illuminating the era in which Shakespeare lived (along with Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Edward de Vere). Bryson’s book has the advantage of being brief, and his style, as always, is pellucid; his is by no means the last word on the subject, but for my purposes it provides a good starting point.

In contrast, Michael Holroyd’s BERNARD SHAW is an exhaustive study (800 pages, condensed from Holroyd’s four-volume original) of the man described as “playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian, and irresistible charmer” and as “the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.” I recently re-read, in my research into Saint Paul, Shaw’s lengthy preface to his play “Androcles and the Lion,” which motivated me to become reacquainted both with his work and with his life. Opening the book to a random page, I found the Shaw quote, “In politics, all facts are selected facts...to put it another way, [in politics] the very honestest [sic] man has a dishonest mind.” That observation will be good to keep in mind in the coming months.

And so to politics: the recently published FAULT LINES is A History of the United States Since 1974, written by historians (and professors at Princeton) Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer. The authors assert that the post-WWII political consensus, tenuous to begin with, began to fracture in the Sixties: “The rebellions and discords of the 1960s,” they write, “led to widespread disillusionment and cynicism about the viability, or even the value, of national consensus and unity. As the country moved on from the tumultuous decade, national leaders rebuilt institutions that privileged division, competing views, and fragmentation.” Economic, social, cultural, and political forces since then have combined, say Kruse and Zelizer, to drive “polarization and partisanship to new depths”; and while Barack Obama tried but failed to heal the divisions, Donald Trump has deliberately exacerbated them as a way of gaining power. To call FAULT LINES “timely” is an understatement; as things currently stand, the ground may give way under our feet at any moment.

Finally, Paul Kahn’s 2005 PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE (available free online at www.epdf.pub) is a thoughtful analysis of the tensions inherent in the modern liberal tradition, tensions especially revealed in recent decades under the strains of what Kahn calls “cultural pluralism” (which less sympathetic critics call “identity politics”). The primary tension is between liberalism’s universalistic aspirations—human rights for all—and its putative nonjudgmental tolerance for cultural, religious, and ethnic particularities: what does a liberal order do, or a nation founded on liberal principles, when either of those values threatens the other? Kahn’s work is usefully read alongside Kruse and Zelizer’sFAULT LINES, the former being a philosophical investigation and the latter an historical narrative, and both books calling into question the stability and durability of the American experiment, as to which we are likely to find out in the immediate future. (By the way, a quick check of the index for PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE reveals not even a single mention of Christopher Lasch, whose work would seem relevant to the topic. I hope the oversight was only by the indexer and not by Paul Kahn.)

07/20/2019

Sarah Ruden’s PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE (2010) received enthusiastic acclaim as an antidote to stereotypically negative views of the apostle, who has been accused over the years of bigotry, sexism, homophobia, acceptance of slavery, and preaching servile submission to political authorities. In her book, Ruden, previously known as a skilled and sensitive translator of ancient literature (Virgil, Homer, Aristophanes, etc.), deployed an array of evidence to show that Paul has been consistently mistranslated, taken out of historical context, and unfairly maligned.

There is some truth to Ruden’s charges; it is folly to read Paul through modern lenses rather than as a man of his own time and place. Regarding the accuracy of translation(s), I bow to Ms. Ruden’s expertise: if the Greek word Paul used that is commonly translated as “men” should instead by translated as “males,” and if “injustice” is a better reading of the Greek than “wickedness,” then so be it. If the problems with Paul were only and merely semantic, we would all be better off.

The problems go deeper, though, and Ruden’s advocacy had its own glaring contextual problem: she failed to foreground Paul’s eschatological bent. Whether critiquing the Puritan notion that Paul was opposed to sensual pleasure, or debunking claims that Paul preached servility to civil authorities, Ruden ignored the fact that whatever advice Paul offered about such things was conditioned (as was everything he wrote) by his conviction that the world was coming to an end. Paul was expressly not trying to build a better world (since God was about to deliver one); he had no program for civic improvement or moral rearmament. Instead, he was offering limited practical advice for believers in Christ to make it through to Jesus’ Parousia—which was due, Paul insisted, any day; in a sense, Paul believed himself to be a second Noah, commissioned by God to round up as many Gentiles as possible for the ark of salvation.

PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE also suffered from the fact that Ruden, like many other defenders of Paul, didn’t bother asking why so many people, even in Paul’s own time, misunderstood him. It’s too easy by far to claim that Paul’s true meanings were deliberately distorted by opponents, lost in translation, or obscured by later generations’ historical amnesia. Paul himself must bear some of the blame; he was to some extent hoisted on the petard of his own incendiary rhetoric. His message was compromised by his shifting his argument to meet different situations and to win over different audiences; he was betrayed at times by his flair for rhetorical devices that, if not used properly, could (and did) backfire. It’s not just modern interpreters who get Paul “wrong”; you need go no further than the sixth verse of the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians—one of the earliest Pauline letters we possess—to realize that Paul fought from the outset an uphill battle against supposed “distortions” of “his” gospel. It may be that Paul’s gospel was never as clear as determined exegetes like Ms. Ruden would have us believe.

Paul’s writings are case studies in the dilemma of what happens when texts (especially “occasional” texts like Paul’s, heavily dependent on audience, context, and circumstance) are set loose in the world; for good or for ill, the author loses control of their meanings. Amy-Jill Levine, referencing Paul’s letters, has made a similar point:

Historical arguments…presume that the “original” audience or the “original intent” determines the meaning. To restrict the question of [meaning] to a text’s author, let alone to claim to know the author’s intent, and not to consider the audience is bad method…what the priest says from the pulpit is not always what the congregants hear in the pew. To suggest that the text cannot take on new meanings but must be interpreted only in the context of its original setting dooms both the church and the synagogue, because this argument precludes people from finding their own meaning in the text…

More accurately, such an approach denies the empirically demonstrable fact that people do in fact find “their own meaning in the text.” That is precisely why Paul had to write to his various groups (ekklesia); the meaning they “found” was not, he insisted, the meaning he intended. Nor should that come as a surprise; why would we think that Paul’s audiences, either Gentiles or Jews, had either the opportunity or the education to puzzle through his complicated arguments that still perplex and divide dedicated exegetes to this day? While Ruden was right to insist that Paul be considered in his historical context, she spent no time in her book considering the contextual reasons why so many of his contemporaries rejected his message—she seems to have assumed that such people simply failed to appreciate Paul’s revolutionary genius.

We should not be surprised that Paul’s message often missed the mark. Before writing his letters, Paul had preached in person to the various ekklesia, yet apparently his meaning(s) had failed to take hold. He then sent letters of clarification and/or correction, which would have been read aloud to the ekklesia—read well or read poorly, read accurately or read erroneously; we can’t assume the readers themselves understood what Paul was getting at or that they clearly communicated his sometimes intricate arguments. Almost certainly the readers, and/or the leaders of the ekklesia, would have been peppered with questions: What did Paul mean when he said the Torah is a curse? Does he really blame the Jews for killing Jesus? Is the law still in effect or not? Why can’t I marry my stepmother? Is the end of the world at hand or isn’t it? Those questions would surely have elicited conflicting answers which may have just added to the confusion; we have no evidence that Paul’s letters, eloquent as they may have been, ever resolved the controversies they addressed or did anything but further confuse the hearers.

Today’s academics study Paul’s work in depth and at their leisure, comparing one missive to another and combing through ancient texts to illuminate Paul’s thought; they also have the advantage of drawing on centuries of prior exegesis. Paul's contemporary audiences, however, for the most part would not have taken such a scholarly approach, had little in the way of exegetical guidance, and may well have missed many of the nuances of Paul’s argument(s).

Moreover: Paul’s statements, even if clearly understood at the outset, would have been altered to one degree or another as they were repeated and passed along orally; many or even most of his hearers were likely illiterate, and in any case there were not a lot of copies of the letters to go around. As much as ancient societies may have depended on such oral transmission, we should not assume it was free of error; the game of “telephone” existed long before the device itself. As Jesus himself said, blessed are the cheesemakers…1

To be clear: my several caveats notwithstanding, Paul is not entirely responsible for misunderstandings of his work; but neither has he been the victim of some vast anti-Pauline conspiracy. After Paul’s death, early Christian communities used his writings for their own purposes; such usage inevitably revealed more about Paul’s interpreters than about Paul. Sarah Ruden noted that none other than the iconic Augustine found in Paul what he set out to find (Original Sin, predestination, and anthropological pessimism), which may or may not have been the same as what Paul intended; the same was true of Luther—and, no doubt, of Sarah Ruden and of me.

Paul didn’t expect his writings to last, because he didn’t expect the world to last; he didn’t foresee them becoming the doctrinal basis for an enduring institutional church. Written in haste and in the heat of evangelical urgency, Paul’s letters were directed to people who were living, he believed, in the final moments of history; but when history persisted, those letters became fair game for exegetes with agendas of their own. Such is the consequence of putting apocalyptic advice in writing.

Beyond all of that, however, what bothers me most about PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE is how Ms. Ruden reserved her sympathy for poor, poor, pitiful Paul rather than for the people whose lives have been adversely impacted by “misunderstandings” of his message. Christian slaveholders, for instance, cited Paul to justify their practice; for Sarah Ruden (at least as expressed in her book) the real crime in that was the harm thereby done to Paul’s reputation—she had little to say about the harm done to the human beings enslaved.

Or take Ruden’s chapter on Paul and homosexuality, “No Closet, No Monsters?” She did an admirable job of showing that the behavior Paul condemned had almost nothing in common with what we think of today as homosexuality, i.e., affectionate, intimate same-sex relationships between consenting adults. Through citation after citation from ancient authors, Greek and Roman alike, Ruden emphasized that what Paul inveighed against were exploitative, brutal, and abusive sexual acts; he didnot condemn loving same-sex relationships (assuming he could even have imagined such things) but culturally systemic pederasty and what amounted to sexual slavery. Ruden properly insisted that Paul denounced the use of sex as an expression of domination, power, and status and that he railed against the reduction of unwilling participants to, and their objectification as, “sexual playthings”.

Now, Ruden's exegesis was powerful indeed, and Paul deserves credit for having disapproved of such behaviors (many others, of course, Jews and pagans alike, disapproved of them as well). But rather than concluding that Christians past and present have mistakenly applied Paul’s invective against the sort of consensual homosexual relationships that exist today, and rather than acknowledging that gay men and women have long suffered the consequence of that mistake, Ruden concluded “No Closet, No Monsters?” with this:

“All this leads to a feeling of mountainous irony. Paul takes a bold and effective swipe at the power structure. 2 He challenges centuries of execrable practice in seeking a more just, more loving society. 3 And he gets called a bigot.”

What is galling here is that Ruden depicted Paul as the real victim of this 2000-year-old misunderstanding, but she had not a word to say on behalf of the millions of men and women who have been persecuted and reviled over the centuries as a result.

I don’t know, of course, what Paul would think of contemporary homosexuality; neither does Ms. Ruden and neither, for that matter, does anyone else. I do know, however, that the damage done to Paul’s posthumous reputation by misreadings of his letters pales compared to the incalculable damage such misreadings have done to millions of lives.

PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE exemplified what is called the “new perspective on Paul”; Ruden made a valiant and erudite effort to understand Paul in context. I only wish she had made more of an effort to understand Paul’s detractors (many in his own time and many more ever since); and I wish that she had been less concerned about rehabilitating Paul and more concerned about the damage done over the centuries in his name.

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1The Life of Brian

2 It's a matter of opinion how "effective" Paul's swipes at power were; the particular "power structure" Paul contested outlived him by some four hundred years, and the mentality behind that structure persists to this day (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein and his friends).

3 Here again Ms. Ruden misstates Paul’s basic intentions—as I said earlier, Paul had no interest in trying to reform society or in challenging the Greco-Roman “power structure”; he was not attempting to build “a more just, more loving society”. Much more modestly, he was trying to ensure that members of the Jesus-movement survived the divine wrath that Paul knew was coming; having shepherded Gentiles aboard the ark of salvation, Paul needed both to maintain order and to see to it that none of his flock fell overboard.